This study of Defoe''s politics aims to challenge the critical demand to see Defoe as a modern and to counter misrepresentations of his political writings by restoring their seventeenth-century context. Offering a full examination of Defoe''s years as a political reporter and journalist (1689-1715), it recovers his traditional, conservative and anti-Lockean ideas on contemporary issues: the origins of society, the role of the people in the establishment of a political society and how monarchies are created and maintained as the means of achieving a beneficent political order. At the heart of Defoe''s political imagination, Manuel Schonhorn finds the vision of a warrior-king, derived from sources in the Bible, and in ancient and English history. The model illuminates his original reading of Robinson Crusoe, which emerges less in terms of a family romance, a tract for the rising bourgeoisie or a Lockean parable of government, than as a dramatic re-enactment of Defoe''s life-long political preoccupations concerning society, government and kingship. Manuel Schonhorn, Books, Fiction and Literature, Defoes Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship and Robinson Crusoe Books>Fiction and Literature, Cambridge University Press